One on One: Ken Segall, the Man Who Put the ‘i’ in iMac

Ken Segall was part of the advertising team that came up with the name iMac.Richard Perry/The New York Times Ken Segall was part of the advertising team that came up with the name iMac.

When you hear about Apple, you mostly hear about the top executives like the late Steve Jobs, his early sidekick Steve Wozniak or the legendary designer Jony Ive. But you probably haven’t heard much about Ken Segall, who worked for the ad agency responsible for Apple’s “Think Different” campaign.

Mr. Segall’s claim to fame is that he was part of the team that came up with the name iMac for the computer that drove Apple back to profitability after it had nearly gone bankrupt. He recently published “ Insanely Simple,” a book about how Mr. Jobs’s ideology about keeping things simple made Apple the most successful corporation in the world. An edited transcript of an interview with Mr. Segall follows.

What do you think of the name of the new iPad, which is simply the iPad?

When I first saw that name I thought it was a mistake. And the more I thought about it, I don’t think it’s a mistake. I think Apple’s products — iMacs, Mac Pro, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air — those things don’t have numbers, and the new one comes out, you get the new one.

Do you want to get an iPad 12 one day? At a certain point the numbers become tedious. So I assume the next iPhone will just be called iPhone.

Those are the kinds of things Apple has always done because it makes it easier for the customer. When the original iMacs came out and they expanded into the five colors, there were a lot of people in the retail channel who hated that because each product had a different SKU number and it was creating this horrible mess. I was in a meeting with Steve Jobs that day and he responded to that criticism and he said: “It makes it more work for you and more work for us, but it makes our customers’ lives better. I don’t want to give them different model names, so just live with it and make it work.” And people would go away and make it work.

What do you think about the Microsoft Surface?

The first thing you hear is widescreen display and a smart cover that has a keyboard built into it, and you think “Hmm, that’s kind of clever.” Throughout the presentation I was struck how they were obviously following the script — they kept referring to it as a PC. I suppose it’s because they think if the world thinks of PCs, Microsoft will be part of it, so it’s all part of this brainwashing, I suppose, to get the market in that direction.

But the whole reason that tablets are the way that they are is they’re not PCs. They’re touch-controlled, and you use the keyboard when you need to use the keyboard, but it’s not supposed to be a keyboard instrument. It exists to be this tablet that you pull out to do certain things. Part of me then feels I’d be very surprised if it makes a dent in Apple’s market share.

So how did you come up with i in iMac?

It seems like a no-brainer to me. Keep in mind Apple was dying at the time. After Steve had returned, he was betting the company on it, that was the air about all the meetings we had.

We filled walls and did all sorts of stuff. It needed to have the word Mac in the name. And there’s an easy way to get on the Internet. When we went in to show Steve there was such things as MacRocket, another was Macster and MacMan. What Steve liked about MacMan was, we thought it sounded a little like Walkman, and he said Sony is a great consumer electronics company, and if there is a rub-off from that I don’t think it would be a terrible thing. Ten years later Steve wouldn’t feel that way any longer.

The thing he told us to keep in mind was because it looked kind of toylike, I don’t want it to sound like a toy. Then we all scratched our heads and said MacMan sounds like PacMan, it sounds like a game. But Steve had that “I like it” thing going on and he followed his heart a lot of the time. The only good thing we could do is go back and find a better one. So I came up with five names, I saved the best one for last. And I said, iMac, and we can list bullet points:

  • i for Internet
  • i for imagination
  • i for individual

It’s so short and we can own that, and one of the reasons also was maybe one day we would want to use it as a foundation for other names. Steve’s reaction? “Hate it.” So we come back a week later with three new names, and, “Hate it, hate it, hate it.”

But we said we still like this one, iMac. And Steve said, I don’t hate it this week, but I still don’t like it, so you’ve got two days.

The next day Steve had it silk-screened on a computer model and he was showing it to his inner circle. There was never a phone call from Steve saying, you guys really are geniuses. It was just silence, and it was suddenly iMac, which was great.

From a branding or marketing perspective, what does Apple have to do now that it’s No. 1 as opposed to the underdog?

I wish the advertising would continue to be fresh and exciting and take chances. The original advertising with iPhone was Mr. Hand holding a phone and it had a bunch of apps on it. They must have done 10 to 15 of those over a period of three years. It’s one of those lessons you learn early in your advertising life that if I’m not really paying attention to the TV and I see that commercial and it looks like the 10 commercials before, I’m not likely to stop in my tracks and look at that commercial.

I think it’s easy for a company that is having amazing success to just say, well, that’s working, so let’s just do more of that. I think with iPhone that’s kind of what they did. The product was so amazing and successful that it was just, let’s not rock the boat on this one.

I hope that the people in charge of marketing in future years remember that part of their roots is, don’t get comfortable with something and always try to reinvent. I have every bit of confidence they’ll continue to innovate in their products and their marketing, but it is one of those things to at least worry about a little bit. People who are successful oftentimes fall back on what has made them successful.

But what about the new Apple iPhone ads with celebrities like Zooey Deschanel and Sam Jackson?

I like to go along with the crowd, and I hear a lot of people complaining about those commercials. I actually really like them.

There are different ways to do celebrity campaigns. Normally they stand up and talk about how great the product is. Apple, for this campaign, has taken an assortment of people and is letting them each do one commercial, rather than the original Siri commercials that show random people using Siri in different ways. They’re an interesting way of demonstrating the features and using celebrities so you’re not literally hiring someone to become the face of Apple.

Where did the name for the company Steve Jobs started after he left Apple come from: NeXT?

A good friend of mine, Tom Suiter, was a very good friend of Steve’s. He worked at Apple back in the days of the Apple II. Steve called him one day when he was starting NeXT — he had broken away from Apple and taken his people, and they were looking for a name for the company. He called him excitedly to say: “Hey Tom, I have this name I’m thinking of for my new company. I’m thinking of calling it Two.”

Tom paused and said: “Well, I don’t know about that, Steve. People might ask you about what happened to One.”

Then Steve said, “That’s why I’m calling you. I think it’s a good name, but if you’ve got a better one that’d be great, could you think about that?”

Later Tom found himself listening to a speech from Bill Gates. During the speech Bill Gates kept using the word “next” when he was talking about new technologies coming from Microsoft. He used the word often enough that Tom noted his repetition and thought, “Wait a minute: next, that means future, that’s a cool thing.” And the next day he called Steve and said, “I’ve got the name for you. Next.” And there’s that pause on the other end, where with Steve you never know what’s going to come. It could be, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” or it could be, “Great.” And he says, “I love it!”

The hilarious part is that no one ever knew where the inspiration came from other than Tom Suiter. I think it’s really interesting that Bill Gates had no idea that he had ever been the inspiration for the name NeXT, and Steve Jobs never ever heard that. So he lived his entire life not knowing that Bill Gates had inspired the name of his new computer company.

What do you think about Apple after Steve Jobs?

I think it’s pretty well accepted that Steve did a great job at burning his values into Apple. I think some people think it’s the end of the world. In 1985 when Steve left, the company descended into mediocrity. I don’t think any of those things will happen now because innovation is so integrated into Apple.

What is true is, Steve was unique; there will never be another Steve. So it can’t be the same, but hopefully his values live on. And I think Apple will meet challenges that Steve never dreamed of, just because the world changes. People will forever debate, “What would Steve have done?” I think after some period of time it will become, “What would Apple do?”